Children into swans: fairy tales and the pagan imagination

Abstract

CHILDREN INTO SWANS: FAIRY TALES AND THE PAGAN IMAGINATION. Jan Beveridge. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2014. 300 p. ISBN: 9780773543942. $29.95. FAIRY TALES ARC FULL OF COMMON ELEMENTS AND THEMES: fairies and elves, dwarfs and giants, people turning into animals, magic of various kinds, journeys to secret worlds hidden just out of view. But where did these ideas come from? And how far back can they be traced? That's the question Jan Beveridge seeks to answer in her book Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination. The main thesis of the work is that these themes reflect an ancient imagination (3). The lingering influence of the pagan imagination, its fears and hopes and rituals, is found everywhere in the fairy tale tradition. The book is divided into four sections: History, Characters, Stories from the Pagan Year, Storytellers' Themes. In the first section, Beveridge traces the history of fairy tales, starting with the early Celtic and Norse storytelling traditions. These ancient stories, says Beveridge, introduce us to one predominant idea, a fairy tale idea, that was central to Celtic and Norse pre-Christian tradition--there is an unseen otherworld existing alongside the visible realm we know (12). Of particular interest in this section is a chapter on the oldest fairy tale--that is, the oldest story that features a fairy: Ectra Condla. In this story, a beautiful and mysterious woman appears to a prince, and tries to entice him to follow her back to her world, back to the Plain of Pleasure, called Moy Mell. The prince resists for a time but is so seized by longing for the fairy maiden that he eventually relents and leaves with her on a silver canoe. This story is preserved in the Book of the Dun Cow, a manuscript written around 1100 AD. The precarious life of this manuscript is given an entire chapter of its own--an interesting (if perhaps unneeded) digression by Beveridge. The historical section concludes with a brief overview of the modern development of fairy tales. The rise of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, with its appreciation for rural life and language, led to the rise of folklore scholarship, and this, in turn, to a resurgence of interest in fairy tales. Unfortunately, this later history of fairy tales isn't examined in any depth by Beveridge, and is only given a few pages. In the second part of the book, Beveridge examines the origins of the most familiar types of characters found in fairy tales, devoting a chapter to each: fairies, elves, dwarfs, household spirits, water dwellers, giants, souls and spirits. A reader shouldn't come to these chapters expecting literary analysis. What Beveridge gives here is a historical survey, and the chapters consist almost entirely of summaries of the different ways in which these characters have appeared throughout the history of fairy tales. Expect to find many paragraphs starting along the lines of, Most stories depict the characters in this way ... Other stories depict the characters like this . …